The Suda is a 10th century Byzantine Greek historical encyclopedia of the
ancient Mediterranean world,
derived from the scholia to critical editions of canonical works and
from compilations by yet earlier authors.
As the Oxford Classical Dictionary notes, ``in spite of its contradictions and
other ineptitudes, [the Suda] is of the highest
importance, since it preserves (however imperfectly) much that is ultimately
derived from the earliest or best
authorities in ancient scholarship, and includes material from many departments
of Greek learning and civilization. [HS96]''

The standard edition of the Suda was edited by Ada Adler and published in five
volumes over the years 1928-1938 [Adl38].
It is organized alphabetically, with entries numbered by the pair (first
letter, sequence number). For example, the entry (beta, 4) is headed by the
Greek word ; its entry spans only 2 lines in the
Adler edition. Some entries, such as the entry for Homer, are much longer.

The full text of the Suda was entered into a 7.3MB computer file by
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG).
The TLG is an
electronic data bank of all extant ancient Greek literature from Homer (8th
century BCE) to 600 CE with historiographical, lexicographical and
scholiastic texts from the period between 600 and
1453 CE. The TLG project is located at the University of California, Irvine and
can be reached via http://www.tlg.uci.edu/~tlg/index.html.
The Greek text is encoded in Beta code, which is an Ascii markup that contains
alphabetic notations (for instance, a denotes ) along with codes
for switching between Greek and Roman fonts, punctuation, and formatting.
Unfortunately, the collection of data is not perfectly uniform; minor
imperfections exist in the TLG's text as well as in the original Adler edition.